Brandon Hall of Pendleton accepted to Juilliard theater program

Brandon Hall, 18, right, of Pendleton and Matt Fulmer, 18, of Columbia perform a scene from Act 2 of “Othello” at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Greenville. Hall was accepted to The Juilliard School from hundreds of applicants.

Acting comes easily to 18-year-old Brandon Hall, who played Othello this week at the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities.

But not much else has.

Two years ago, the self-described average student from Pendleton High School narrowly earned his way into the Governor's School on raw artistic talent, said his mentor, drama department Chairman Dan Murray.

There, teachers had him tested and discovered a long-undiagnosed learning disability. Hall has short-term memory loss.

"He was a real left-field choice," Murray said. "We pulled him aside and told him, ‘You can get by as a charming, well-intentioned guy, or you can address this now and get back on grade level.' It really was a matter of him reaching his potential."

After years of struggling in public school, Brandon embraced the challenges he now better understood, his family and teachers said.

"For his lines, he would study, study, study through repetition," said Hall's mother, Betty Hall. "But when it came to his academics, because he wasn't comprehending like normal, we saw it in his work. I always thought there was something there."

Hall has been on the Governor's School honor roll ever since he arrived there as a junior and freely discusses his love for the works of Shakespeare, August Wilson and Harper Lee.

"I learned to stop asking so many questions and find things out for myself," he said.

Last month, Hall also learned he had been admitted into the nation's most prestigious acting program: The Juilliard School in New York. Hall survived four rounds of cuts from an initial pool of more than 200 students from around the world. Nine men and nine women were eventually chosen for the program.

"Juilliard was one of those … It's like he was on a baseball diamond, and they were throwing fastballs, and he kept knocking them out of the park," his mother said. "Then they threw a curve ball, and he knocked that out, too."

His two trips to New York were the first flights he'd taken in his life.

"The second visit to Juilliard was the first time he'd been on a plane by himself," Murray said. "He gave me a call and said he was hungry. I told him to what to buy, then to take a cab uptown to the Lincoln Center."

Hall's mother raised her two children by herself. A custodian at Pendleton High School, Betty Hall is developing a youth ministry through her church, the Tabernacle of Praise and Deliverance, and reaches out to other children now that her own are grown.

"I am so grateful that despite the stigma of being a single mom, that giving them what they needed, structure and balance, that I have produced these two wonderful kids," she said.

Hall's older sister, Octavia, described her brother as fearless. She is an award-winning vocal performance major at Anderson University.

"He goes with it," she said. "He doesn't think twice."

The school has offered Hall a four-year scholarship package worth about $120,000, and he's fielding other offers from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Fordham and Southern Methodist University.

Hall credited his success at the Governor's School — academically and in the arts — to one-on-one work with teachers, including voice and speech teacher Jayce Tromsness and creative writing teacher Scott Gould. He said his senior classmates in drama have also "cried, sweat and bled" with him.

Betty Hall said her son's teachers have worked with his disability by not timing his tests and giving him lecture notes ahead of time. His anxiety in class has disappeared, she said, and his confidence has soared.

Hall has a knack for physical and verbal mimicry — able to repeat everything he sees as a visual learner, his mother said.

"That blows me away. I say, ‘How do you do that?'" she said. "He says, ‘Mama, it's just easy to me.'"

Hall described playing Othello — the lead in a 400-year-old tragedy of a Moor who marries and murders an Italian noblewoman — "a journey." Actors, he said, give themselves over to the role.

"I want to be inside the fence with the beast," he said of acting, and he knocked his fists together. "The actors, we are breathing into each other's faces."

During a dress rehearsal this week, Hall navigated the Elizabethan English freely, bringing meaning to the ancient words through tone, gestures, facial expressions and fluid interplay with the other drama students. In a monologue, he describes the budding romance with Desdemona, which would turn into rage after he's told falsely that she has betrayed him.

"Shakespeare does all the work for you," he said. "You just have to be a vessel."

Hall's chorus and musical theater teacher at Pendleton High School, Sarah Reese, said she encouraged the Governor's School to take a chance with Hall. A former principal singer with the New York Metropolitan Opera, she said she recognized Hall could accomplish great things "if he keeps his head on straight."

She described dragging the always tardy — yet pleasant and witty — young man into her classroom and confronting him about taking the arts seriously.

"He got on stage in our little showcase and he played Mufasa from ‘The Lion King,'" Reese said. "There was something that was unpolished, raw, unrefined, but it was so honest. I saw it at that moment, and I suggested he audition for the Governor's School."

Governor's School judges were on the fence about Hall, Murray said, until he came back after an initial audition with a new monologue.

"It was two pages, four minutes of material," Murray said. "He had it word for word and had personalized it. We knew at that point we had a live one."

But Hall was struggling to express himself orally and in writing. Students admitted to the Governor's School are among the top academic achievers in the state, regularly sending students to Ivy League schools and producing average SAT scores near the top among public schools.

Hall spent every night in study hall and many weekends.

"I would come in the middle of a sunny day, and he'd be there with his Riverside Shakespeare or a writing assignment for English," Murray said. "He essentially buckled down. It's very old school what he did."

Hall said he's learned how to take risks and says his faith in God got him through the roughest times.

"I had a small role in ‘Romeo and Juliet' last year," Hall said. "I was the kid who dreaded Shakespeare, and there I was in rehearsal doing it and liking it."